Business increasingly relies on software solutions to maintain all aspects of a business. Software developers may work on different teams to develop these software solutions by creating services that are designed to address specific business needs. For example, a first team of software developers may design a service to receive a purchase order for a product, a second team of software developers may design a service to update an inventory database to reflect the purchase of the product, and a third team of software developers may design a service to handle receipt of payment and shipping of the product.
Once the services are developed, they may be integrated into a single system. The services may be called by a client located at a front-end computer and executed by a server located at a back-end. The client may call a service interface, which may locate the service at the back-end, provide the service with the required parameters to execute its functionality, and return the results of executing the service to the client.
However, the service interface must have sufficient information about each service in order to invoke it, such as the required parameters for the service, location of the service at the server, and permissions of a client to execute the services. As a result, each time that a software developer creates a new service to integrate into the system, the service interface must be updated. This process of updating the service interface can be time consuming and lead to errors. For example, when a client generates a request to purchase a product, the service interface may erroneously request to ship the product before checking inventory to ensure that the product is available. Accordingly, a need exists for solutions that allow services to be integrated into a system and that allow services to be activated or deactivated at runtime.